


The static of your arms, it is the catalyst

by nichestars



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Mention of Mind Control, Mention of torture, Mutant Powers, X-Men AU - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 11:38:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11289957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nichestars/pseuds/nichestars
Summary: "It's not like I meant to take it," Rey tells Luke later. "I can't help it."Luke nods, a measured incline of his head, once and then twice. His hands are folded in the weathered fabric of his cloak, and he's watching the sea, not Rey."I don't think it makes me a bad person," Rey says, quieter."No," Luke says. "We don't choose our gifts."Or, an x-men au.





	The static of your arms, it is the catalyst

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MusicLover500](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicLover500/gifts).



> This is a gift for rey-of-luke/MusicLover500 as part of the #prsummerexchange17 -- I hope you enjoy it! I really enjoyed writing it. The prompt was “X-Men AU/Crossover.” Thank you to [P](http://monscarisaac.tumblr.com) for the quick beta and encouragement through the process of writing this. 
> 
> This fic is an x-men au set in the Star Wars universe. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out who each character would be in such an au, although it’s not always a strict one-to-one comparison. I hope that figuring out those identities/gifts in this fic is a fun easter egg for x-men fans.

_Leech_ , Unkar Plutt had called her, as a child. 

_Unwanted_ , his tone had said. _Useless, always feeding off others._. 

On Starkiller, when Kylo Ren had wormed into her head, had taken her most secret longings for his own and laughed at her -- 

His hand on her face was the mistake. 

He could've looked all he wanted without paying for it, but he had to touch, and Rey had felt the familiar aching stretch of her cells, hungry. 

And then she was in his head. 

_You're a monster,_ she had thought, calf-deep in snow, stumbling through the dark woods.

"Leech," he spat, anger bubbling up like the dark blood on his cloak. "That belongs to me!"

:

"It's not like I meant to take it," Rey tells Luke later. "I can't help it." 

Luke nods, a measured incline of his head, once and then twice. His hands are folded in the weathered fabric of his cloak, and he's watching the sea, not Rey.

"I don't think it makes me a bad person," Rey says, quieter. 

"No," Luke says. "We don't choose our gifts."

:

At night, Rey curls into the bunk at the back of the Falcon that smells like motor oil and a man's spicy cologne, and repeats Luke's words to herself. _We don't choose our gifts._ Later, he'd added, _we can only choose what to do with what we are given._

Rey thinks of Luke, how carefully he carries himself, the slow tread of his scuffed boots on the stones of the temple ruins. The measured way he speaks, as if he can't bear for even a word to get away from him. 

She thinks of Leia. _Witch_ , hard tongues call her beneath their breath, people who have never met her. _Her father's daughter_ , they say, and they're thinking of the man in the mask, not Bail Organa. 

Rey thinks of Finn, too, and the way the earth moved under their feet when they embraced. Finn doesn't know his own powers yet, and Rey hates that she used them before he did -- rending a planet apart to protect him from that advancing dark figure in the snow. 

None of them chose this. 

:

In the control room, she’d reached for Poe without thinking, dizzy with the relief and the excitement of seeing the map to Luke Skywalker projected, glittering, above their heads. 

Poe had opened his arms, and Rey had jerked back, rocking on her heels, wrapping her arms around herself instead. “Sorry,” she said, as he did, and they smiled shyly at each other. 

“You don’t know me,” Poe said, “I’m Poe Dameron, I’m--” 

“The pilot,” Rey had said. For a moment she had felt the buzz of electrical energy coming off his skin, _so close_. “What’s your--” she waves a hand in the air, feeling out the snap of current around them. 

“Oh,” Poe shrugs. “I’m good with electricity, that kind of stuff.” 

Beebee-Ate bumps at Rey’s knee, optical swiveling. 

“Beebee-Ate says you’re more than good,” Rey says. She hadn’t expected him to be modest. 

“Well,” Poe makes a face. “It’s not really something I can help.” 

Rey thinks of how she’d very nearly stolen the ability from him within five minutes of their meeting, and nods. 

:

Rey comes back to the Resistance and Finn sweeps her up in a hug on the tarmac, buries his nose against her neck and sighs happily. And then he introduces her to Rose, and Rey lets go of something she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. A breath, maybe. 

“I can make the earth move,” Finn tells her, wide-eyed across the table in the mess hall. “I can _make the earth move_!” 

Rey nods, smiling helplessly, his enthusiasm contagious. “I know! It’s amazing.” 

Rose can make people feel things, Rey learns. All she has to do is touch someone, and she can make them do anything she wants. 

Rey doesn’t think she wants that power. She keeps a careful distance. 

:

She asks Finn just once. 

He looks offended for a moment, and then understanding. “No, Rey, no. I promise, she’s not -- she would never use it on me. She can control it.” 

He hugs her tighter around the waist, where they’re sitting side by side on a crate in the loading bay. “She’s a good person. I really think you two could be friends.” 

“You’re my friend,” Rey says, hesitantly. “You and Poe.” 

“You can have more than two friends,” Finn scoffs. 

Rey knows better than to think it comes easily to him, but sometimes… she envies how easy he makes it look.

:

“You know, no one ever thinks you do it on purpose.” 

Poe slides into the empty seat to Rey’s left and gives her an inscrutable look. 

“What,” she asks, knowing and unwilling to acknowledge it so easily.

“Take their powers.” Poe props his elbows on the table and cups his hands around his steaming mug. “Or -- replicate them. You're not really taking anything.” 

That's not how it feels, to Rey. Nor, she'd wager, to most of the people who unknowingly passed her their talents. She runs her fingertip through the dust of sugar left on the table from Poe doctoring his caf, and sucks her finger clean. 

Poe doesn't say anything, and they sit in silence until the bell rings for changing of the shift. 

:

She sees Luke in her dreams as he was: when she was a child, and he would pick her up and hold her to his chest, and the two of them would move like the wind, so fast that Rey could look down and see her father’s feet barely touching the ground. 

Now, he hunches, making himself smaller and shuffling as he passes people in the halls. They hardly know what to do with him on base, like his charade has convinced them to forget what he can be: to forget the legends of Luke Skywalker. 

Rey herself thinks she's forgotten what it felt like to move that way, until she's taking a step forward to catch Jess’ elbow, moving her out of the way of a reversing lift droid, and the two of them are across the hangar, Jess gasping and throwing up on Rey’s feet. 

“I'm so sorry,” Rey says, horrified, and Jess laughs, wiping the back of her mouth. 

“Are you kidding? That was incredible.”

:

Rey wakes up clammy with sweat, gasping. There's no more hope of sleep -- she can't close her eyes again without seeing that mask glinting behind her eyelids -- and she pulls on her boots, makes her way to the mess.

It won’t be open for hours, but the doors are unlocked and she slips in anyway. 

There's a hunched figure at the table closest to the brewing station, with a pot of caf and a chipped mug. 

“Couldn't sleep?” She asks.

Poe turns, and seeing her, shrugs. The corner of his mouth lifts like he's still trying for a smile. “Bad dreams.”

Rey nods. They haven't talked about it, but everyone on base knows. Poe had been strapped to the same chair she had, and Poe doesn't have her gift for… what had he called it? Duplication. 

Rey wraps her arms tighter around herself and sits down. 

“I see that stupid mask,” she admits, quietly. “It's -- worse, in my head. Hollow. Like there's no one behind it at all.”

Poe doesn't look at her. “That is worse.”

“I'm sorry,” she says, suddenly angry on his behalf. Why did the force decide someone as good as Poe should be left unable to defend himself against _that_? “I'm sorry for what he did to you.”

Poe shrugs again, and reaches across the table. His hand looks pale in the cold light of the mess hall, and the blood under his fingernails looks almost like it could simply be shadows.

Rey stops herself, her fingertips an inch away from his. Like there's something between them.

There's nothing between them.

That's what scares her.

“I don't want to--” she searches for the words. “I don't want to take that from you.”

Poe's fingers flex on the table top, but he doesn't move his hand. “I told you, you're not taking anything.”

Rey can't explain it, so she doesn't try. 

They leave their hands there, so close, and never touching.

:

Leia plaits her hair, the day of Han’s memorial. She does it silently, her small hands working briskly through the tangles in Rey’s hair. 

“I keep thinking I could have saved him,” Rey says, not daring to meet Leia’s eyes in the mirror.

Leia snorts. “Don’t put that on yourself.” 

“If I’d just -- if I’d picked up the right power, I could’ve --” 

Leia tugs Rey’s hair back firmly, making her look up. “That’s not on you, Rey.”

“It’s the one time my stupid gift would’ve been _helpful_ ,” Rey tries to explain. “The one time it would’ve been worth... the way people always look at me.” 

Sighing, Leia continues the braid at the back of Rey’s head. “That’s their problem, not yours. And it’s always helpful. You are one of the few people I know who honestly tries to _help_ others with your gift.” 

“Poe is better at it than I am,” Rey says quietly. 

“Poe has had longer to practice,” Leia says, raising an eyebrow. 

Rey wrinkles her nose. “Not that much longer.”

“No, not that much longer. But he’s had more practice with _people_ ,” Leia says, kindly. 

:

Rey finds him in the hangar, making all the lights and toggles of Black One dance. He’s whistling under his breath, the same tune she’d heard Finn humming in the hallway earlier. 

“Hey,” she says, scuffing her feet on the hangar floor so as not to startle him. 

He grins. “Hey. Come up here, look at what I did with this compression valve.”

Rey clambers up the side of the x-wing to peer into the cockpit and to where Poe is indicating. “It’s… a compression valve.” 

Poe makes an injured face, and Rey backtracks. “I just mean, it would be easier for you to just solder a regular sweat valve.”

Poe wipes his hands on the thighs of his pantsuit and nods. “I know. It just... feels better to do something normally, I guess, sometimes. Feels less like I’m cheating.” 

“Oh.” Rey chews the inside of her cheek. “That makes sense.” 

“I mean, the powers are awesome,” Poe says, grinning. “But it feels good to know that I’d still be _me_ without them, you know?”

“Yes.” Rey looks at that ordinary little compression valve and smiles. Being around Poe makes her feel that way: like she could be just Rey, without any powers at all, and the two of them would still fit as comfortably. 

:

The base where they’ve regrouped after D’Qar is smaller, older in a way that feels perpetually musty. Rey continues to sleep on the Falcon, but even that begins to feel stifling with so many people working around them on the hastily laid runway, day and night. 

It’s easy to lose oneself in the woods for a few hours, bask in the quiet of the mountain slopes above the base and _breathe_.

Poe comes with her, sometimes. She can tell he’s smothering too, and his shoulders always settle more naturally after an hour of climbing over the fallen trunks of old trees and putting their feet in the rock puddles of tiny waterfalls. 

“It’s how I always imagined Endor,” he says, and Rey leans back on her elbows in the weedy undergrowth and waits. “The trees are different, obviously. And there’re no Ewoks.” 

“I would love to meet an Ewok,” Rey says, seriously. 

“They’d love you.” His smile is very soft, and very close. “Everyone loves you, though.” 

Rey closes her eyes for the space of a breath, and opens them again. “Everyone?”

Poe’s mouth is pink, like the soft inside of the shell Finn and Rose brought her back from their last mission, like the petals of the wildflowers on the other side of the clearing. Like the flush going down her throat. “Everyone,” he says, so close that Rey’s body is tingling, anticipating his powers as her own. 

“Are you--” Rey hesitates. Her breathing sounds very loud between them. “Are you sure you want to give me this?”

Poe laughs. “I want to give you everything.” 

He kisses her, and back at base, every light comes on.


End file.
